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Creating Alpine Linux Packages

Build APKBUILDs with abuild

Discover what you can do with APKBUILDs, and try building your first package using abuild.

We'll cover the following...

Preface

The abuild package also installs an additional tool for us: newapkbuild. This command can be used for creating a template to base our first package on.

Run newapkbuild

First, let’s see how to run newapkbuild. Its help page lists all available commands:

Shell
$ newapkbuild -h
newapkbuild 3.9.0-r0 - generate a new APKBUILD
Usage: newapkbuild [-n PKGNAME] [-d PKGDESC] [-l LICENSE] [-u URL]
       [-a | -C | -m | -p | -y | -r] [-s] [-c] [-f] [-h]
       PKGNAME[-PKGVER] | SRCURL
Options:
  -n  Set package name to PKGNAME (only use with SRCURL)
  -d  Set package description to PKGDESC
  -l  Set package license to LICENSE, use identifiers from:
      <https://spdx.org/licenses/>
  -u  Set package URL
  -a  Create autotools package (use ./configure ...)
  -C  Create CMake package (Assume cmake/ is there)
  -m  Create meson package (Assume meson.build is there)
  -p  Create perl package (Assume Makefile.PL is there)
  -y  Create python package (Assume setup.py is there)
  -r  Create rust package (Assume Cargo.toml is there)
  -s  Use sourceforge source URL
  -c  Copy a sample init.d, conf.d, and install script
  -f  Force even if directory already exists
  -h  Show this help

We’ll go through these options at a later stage, so don’t worry if these aren’t immediately clear. Since we only want to create a simple dummy package, only a handful of options are relevant for us. The following command will do to create our first package:

Shell
newapkbuild -d "This is our first package" "our-first-package-0.0.1"

Afterward, we can inspect the output newapkbuild generated:

Shell
# Contributor:
# Maintainer:
pkgname=our-first-package
pkgver=0.0.1
pkgrel=0
pkgdesc="This is our first package"
url=""
arch="all"
license=""
depends=""
makedepends=""
checkdepends=""
install=""
subpackages="$pkgname-dev $pkgname-doc"
source=""
builddir="$srcdir/"
build() {
	# Replace with proper build command(s)
	:
}
check() {
	# Replace with proper check command(s)
	:
}
package() {
	# Replace with proper package command(s)
	:
}

As we can see, newapkbuild has set pkgdesc to the description we passed to it via -d and set pkgname to the last positional argument we passed to it. Let’s go over the function of the individual keys, line by line.

  • Contributor is an optional comment that is used in aports, Alpine’s package tree. Everyone that has contributed to this particular APKBUILD is listed here in the format Name <email@example.org>. There may be multiple contributors to one APKBUILD, in which case there are multiple
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